blackblog.

First of all: It really sucks. These days the connection is so incredibly slow, that working via interactive protocols (e.g. ssh ) is virtually impossible – A ping roundtrip is around 350-450ms. This is actually not too bad, but jitter and loss really get me crazy – Sometimes connection is stuck for about a minute. In November lag & loss were quite acceptable – It was even possible to upload stuff with about 16kb/s – But right now were down to less than 2kb/s and frequent disconnects cause of too high packet loss. First I thaught, that the Uplink of NTU is just packed, so I took my Laptop and tried it at other locations. But even when you get on the net via Wireless@sg or other carriers, the situation is quite the same. Most of the slowdown seems to be related to the Taiwan earthquake in late December 2006, which cut down many fiber optic links in the Taiwan straits. I just found some news, that none of the cables has been restored yet. Other bloggers in the region also complain about lag & packet loss…

So lets get into some investigations, what’s really happening…

• I checked an outbound traceroute from a Wireless@sg hot-spot (121.7.111.223) to my server in Germany (some.host.name)So it is clearly to be seen: Highly congested uplink, many many hops – According to router names, the virtual link from Singapore to Palo Alto IX seems to be completely packed. Full output of traceroute from a Wireless@Sg to my server.
• So I logged onto my server and traced the reverse way. Of course, this far-far-away host in Singapore has an highly asymmetric route. Interestingly I get only very few packet loss in this direction. Full output of traceroute from my server to a Wireless@Sg host.
• My next try was checking routes from several looking glasses… So heres the list: STIX (SG) to my host, Qwest (SG) to my host, my university to wireless@sg, dtag-lg (DE) to wireless@sg. All show more or less jitter / lag.

So let’s hope that they get the cables fixed soon…